“You make me sublimely happy,” he said.
“That could be a preparation for sublime sadness,” she said.
“Isn’t that—at its heart—what happiness is, sublime sadness?”
“Yes,” she said: “Kiss me.”
They were back in the clearing where they’d left the car, and just in time, for right there at the end they could barely see, darkness had so quickly descended. When he switched on the car’s headlights she laughed and lampooned: “How far these little Mercedes candles throw their beams!” And then: “How long will it take to get to the inn?”
“Fifteen minutes or so.”
“After we get there, and after I’ve combed my hair and changed into my proper shoes, is when you’ll tell me about you and Zee,” she stated.
“It’s a saga. I’ll do my best to compress it.”
The inn diverted. It dated back to 1704. It had been built as the manor house of a New Netherlands Dutchman of the patroon aristocracy. Stone was what it was made of: fieldstone that had been back-breakingly gathered and put into primitive wheel-barrows and taken to the building site on a hill overlooking the Hudson, the stones then sized and chiseled and finally, one by one, mortared into place. The vertical beams and criss-crossed rafters that supported its roof were bark-stripped trunks and squared-off limbs of axed-down oak trees. A large, romantically rendered oil portrait of the (imagined) patroon hung on the wall just inside the inn’s front door. Pictured was a big-chested, florid-faced, silver-buckled man wearing knee-breeches and a warm coat and a tri-corn hat—The Patroon—astride a horse, comfortable in the saddle—surrounded by a horde of tattered, driven, worsened men busy, back there in the dawn days of the eighteenth century, busy at building the house. Now, these 250-plus years later, the patroon’s house was owned by a Swiss restaurateur who employed the cordon bleu chef who produced the fine food that gave the inn its starred reputation.
Morgan had requested a quiet table; the head-waiter had complied by reserving the retreat of a small, softly lighted room. They were the only people in it. They had studied the menu and ordered their food. The waiter had gone away to the kitchen. Sylvia said: “Now, Morgan: about you and Zee. Tell me first how long you’ve known her.”
“Nearly twenty years.”
“That long!”
“Maud and I met her over the matter of adopting a child. We had applied to Tilden-Herne for a boy. Thanks to Miss Sly’s golden persuasion, we ended up with Julia and Caroline. We—”
Her eyes had widened. “They’re adopted?” she exclaimed: “Julia and Caroline, adopted? I didn’t know! It never occurred to me.”
“There’s no reason why it should have,” he said. It’s not something—”
She stopped him. “Please, Morgan, I must know: what’s their birth-date?”
“April twenty-seventh, 1940.”
She flung her hands across the table and gripped his and clung to them as if she were, life or death, in his hands: “Oh Morgan! If I am right, then it’s all come full-circle home.”
The look on her face, the mire of her sorrow, her hold on his hands, reversed their positions: he was the one now in her hands: “For God’s sake, help me, Sylvia. How have I hurt you?”
She was immediate: “It’s not you. Or me. It’s what happened. And the ramifications. I might lose you.”
“I’m not losable.” But he was, to the point of vulgarity, desperate. “I don’t give a fiddler’s fuck about what the hell happened. I’m not losable. And stop crying. I can’t bear to see you cry. Just tell me.”
She blinked. She was fast and brilliantly intelligent about where she knifed in: “When I told you I have no brothers or sisters, it was a part lie. I never had a brother, but I did have a half-sister, Katherine, my father’s daughter by his first wife. And if I am right in what I think—if everything I think is proved to fit—then Julia and Caroline are Katherine’s blood children.”
Now he saw it. Miss Sly’s conduct at the Cleveland airport had prepared him for the appearance of something, something that had turned out to be this: the past being, as it was right now—being seen: having come (in Sylvia’s words) “full-circle home.”
“Morgan—”
He kissed her hands. He said for the third time: “I’m not losable.” Then, quelling all he was thinking, all he was feeling, he said: “Listen, my love, we’re going to have dinner and we’re going to be peaceful and you’re going to fill in all the blanks for me and we won’t weep—either of us—and my promise will still pertain: I’ll leave it to you to set the pace.”
So what had begun as a history of his and Miss Sly’s relationship became then a different history, Sylvia’s to tell: the history of Julia and Caroline’s conception.
“I’ll tell you the hardest part first,” Sylvia said. “Once I’ve done that, I’ll be all right.”
Katherine Phelps, dead at age twenty-four. Bled to death after giving birth to twin girls on April 27, 1940. That was the hardest part to say.
Now go further back—to 1915—the year Edgar Phelps’s first wife died, leaving him at age twenty-six a widower: father of three-month-old Katherine. Next, go forward—to 1920—the year Edgar Phelps married Sylvia’s mother; and forward further by eleven months, to Sylvia’s birth on March 31, 1921. An age difference of five years between Katherine and Sylvia. For Katherine, doted on singly until Sylvia was born, Sylvia was no joy. Katherine’s “resentment” of Sylvia had never “fully” been resolved. “Resentment,” though, too malignant a word: erase it: try vexation or choler instead—or any other more forgiving, more childishly active word. Because the vexation or choler—call it what you will—abated when Katherine went off to college, and by the time, early in 1939, when Katherine was twenty-three and Sylvia eighteen—when Katherine met and became engaged to Richard Hamilton—she and Sylvia, older now, were: “Almost close: compatible enough to be able to laugh together.” (It was at this point that the waiter returned, bearing on a tray their dinner’s first course. They let go of each other’s hands and picked up their soup spoons. “Odd, isn’t it, to be presented with lobster bisque at the same time I’m telling you all this,” Sylvia said. More odd, hunger itself, that they welcomed the food. “Go on,” he said.) The date of Katherine and Richard’s wedding was set for Saturday, August 5, 1939. The invitations had long been mailed. It was to be a large wedding, in its genteel way, elaborate. Sylvia was to be Katherine’s maid of honor. There was a spate of festive pre-nuptial parties. Two nights before the wedding, driving home alone at a late hour, Richard was killed, his car—found—crushed at the bottom of a ravine. There were awful scourings of skid marks on the road. Surmise was that he’d swerved to avoid hitting an animal, a fox or a racoon, maybe a deer…. On the sea of her grief, for a terrible long while, Katherine floated, seemingly lifeless, on her back, staring up at the sky. No one could reach her. Everyone tried. Give her time, they said. In time, she will heal. How could they, knowing Katherine, have thought so? It was Sylvia’s mother, Katherine’s step-mother, who, four months later, in mid-December, “guessed” that Katherine was pregnant. And it was to Sylvia, then—at Christmastime—Katherine confided that she’d known for the past four months she was pregnant and had conspired with herself to keep it secret until it was—“too late for anything to be done.” She would have Richard’s baby…. Katherine’s father, Sylvia’s father—a conventional, Methodist man—viewed his daughter’s pregnancy as a blemish on his image of himself. By Edgar Phelps’s decree, Katherine would be sent away, be sent out of sight. He took the position that by the time the baby was due to be born, Katherine would see the sense of putting the baby up for adoption. His wife’s oldest, dearest friend—his friend too—was Zenobia Sly. Zee (he said) could be counted on to save the situation. And so it was to Zee Katherine was sent: under Zee’s loving care, in Zee’s home, that Katherine spent the remainder of her pregnancy’s term…. “What my father never knew,” Sylvia said, “is that—against him—Zee and my mother plotted with
Katherine that Katherine would keep the baby.”…How had it been possible that the Cleveland obstetrician hadn’t known—until that dire hour Katherine went into labor—that she was carrying two babies; twins? Katherine hemorrhaged. Within a few minutes of the second baby’s birth, Katherine was dead…. Sylvia was nineteen, away at college in her freshman year at Radcliffe. From her mother, by telephone, she learned the two-fold tidings of Katherine’s death and the twins’ existence. “In a daze,” she had gone home for Katherine’s funeral. Of the long overnight train trip, she retained “only the mistiest memory.” On the day after the funeral, her father—empowered to do so by the fact of his being Katherine’s closest living relation—signed the legal document in accordance with which the infant twins, under the sponsorship of the Tilden-Herne Agency, were “placed” for adoption. The evening of the same day, Sylvia was present in the room—“when Zee swore to my father and my mother that she would undertake to find for the twins the best possible parents. ‘I will risk playing God; I will choose who their parents will be,’ Zee vowed.” Sylvia remembered that one of the room’s windows was open, letting in and making audible the first shrill springtime pipings of tree toads. “I remember thinking how usual the tree toads’ pipings sounded to me—by some supreme law of continuance, how purely usual.” And oh, the strangeness of it: how the pipings had nearly drowned out the voices of Sylvia’s father and mother and Zee, who, from their human throats, strummed the fate of the five-day-old twins.
It became his turn, then, to speak: to tell Sylvia that head-to-toe, mind, heart, and gut, he and Maud had known they’d been chosen; been, by Miss Sly, picked. And to further say that the minute the twins were in Maud’s and his hands, by the court’s edict forever in Maud’s and his keeping, all connection with Tilden-Herne, hence with Miss Sly, would—under ordinary circumstances—have been severed. Miss Sly had herself emphasized the efficacy of such disconnection—“For the reason of its psychological soundness.” And certainly Maud had not only desired disconnection but had seemed, psychologically and emotionally, to absolutely require it. And so, under ordinary circumstances, and for all time, all sides would have honored such disconnection. But for the war. The war had played havoc with intention. “The altering war,” Morgan said. Its dislocation, its loneliness, its terror. But for the war, he would never have written a first letter to Miss Sly. But for the war, Miss Sly would never have answered that first letter, nor permitted herself to write all those subsequent peculiarly inspiriting letters that had reached him in distant places now almost mythically remembered; letters he had read and re-read, in one of which was that Morphean incantation he had memorized and put himself to sleep by on enemy-infested seas whose exchanging waters lapped against the shores of the earth’s seven continents—“One good hen, two ducks, three cackling geese, four plump partridges, five…” And when at last, at last the war ended and he came home and resumed a normal life—“to the degree there is such a thing”—he had called Miss Sly, called her with the trepidant expectation of being censored for the impulse, or of being told by her that, due to the war’s end, further contact between them would not be possible. But no! She “welcomed” his call—by which word she acknowledged that the bond forged by those letters, was not to be cut…. Maud, though, protested the bond. He had tried to explain it. An impasse. He and Maud made a pact: between themselves, they would never speak of Miss Sly…. “Beginning then, Miss Sly became my secret life…. Even after that night at Carnegie Hall when we bumped as a family into Miss Sly, bumped into you—Sylvia—even after that, Maud and I never spoke of her.” He stopped talking—suddenly impressed by the morality of the flashed thought that all of what, often stumbling, he had just told Sylvia, and all of what, often stumbling, Sylvia had told him—belonged to the past: was the past’s rightful property: not theirs to rake over…. He said as much, then, to Sylvia.
She nodded, clear-browed, and affirmed: “That’s my belief too, Morgan; and I want you to know I’ll always be glad you said it first.” She glanced down at their empty dessert plates, then back up at his face, into his eyes, and almost smiling, wondrously declared: “So here we’re left! And look at us! At what a pair of gluttons we are! We’ve eaten everything that was set before us, everything, like well-brought-up children admonished by a nurse to think of the starving Armenians.” And next, and quickly, with her near-smile vanished: “But before we go on from wherever it is we’ve been left, I must ask you: Is there such a recognized thing as a half-aunt? And if there is such a thing, isn’t that what I am to your daughters?”
As a trust-and-estates lawyer, her questions were right up his alley. “Yes, there is such a recognized thing, and yes, perforce of agnate blood, that’s what you are to Julia and Caroline: a half-aunt. And to quote my great mentor, Roger Chandler, ‘Such are the scrambled eggs of family trees.’”
Her laugher came like the chimes of a striking clock. Its capacity updated her, updated him: placed them together in the present tense—
Consequence is what being alive is all about.
I love you—
The waiter appeared. Would they have coffee? Yes? No. Just the check, please.
Out of the inn, in the cold night (stars in the sky), they walked the short distance to the parking lot. In the car, away from anyone’s sight, they kissed, this time erotically. Then he turned on the car’s engine and they set off on the drive back to the city.
They agreed: “Not tonight.”
“I’ll call you on Thursday, the minute the plane lands.”
“Be safe,” she said.
They would meet on Friday evening, they said. He would decide where they would have dinner. And after dinner—
“Then,” she said.
He left her at her building’s front door. From there, he drove to the garage, and from the garage walked home. Not out-loud singing. But singing, striding along in step with the pace she had, now, so wonderfully set.
Monday, November 9, 1959
Fasten seat belt. No smoking. Crab onto the runway. Wait. Rev the engines. Move forward. Accelerate. Faster, faster. LIFT. Ascend. Ascend.
Aloft, and the plane leveled off, he took a yellow pad out of his briefcase and, on behalf of his client, Patricia Forbes, began to draft the complaint that charged the Graham-Sorensen hospital with negligently permitting the suicide of her husband, the astrophysicist Dwight Forbes. In time, this lawsuit would become known as “the Forbes case,” or, in court parlance, Forbes v. the Graham-Sorensen Psychiatric Clinic.
Work made the trip a fast one. Fasten seat belt. No smoking. Prepare to land. He put the pages of the drafted complaint back in his briefcase. Descend. Lake Erie below. Circle. Swing inland. Descend, descend. NOW. Touchdown. (“Be safe,” Sylvia had said.)
A small crowd was clumped together at the terminal’s entry-gate. His eyes lit on a wide-brimmed, flat-topped hat banded round by the feathers of a murdered game-bird. The hat’s wearer stepped forward.
“Pa! What a surprise!”
“Me, or the hat?” Ansel Shurtliff laughed.
“Both. In equal measure.”
“Letitia told me what time your plane was due in, and meeting you seemed a good way to have a bit of time alone with you. I worried you wouldn’t see me—”
“With that hat, Pa, you’re not to be missed. Where the hell did you get it?”
“A fright, isn’t it? Fred Bingley brought it to me from Australia. I figured I’d wear it this one time. It did the trick: it caught your eye.”
“It’s truly—”
Ansel Shurtliff swept the hat from off his head. “Take it,” he said. “I’d love you to have it. Among your vast acquaintance there must be someone you can give it to. Now that I think of it, I bet Caroline would appreciate it.”
“Probably.” Morgan laughed. “Probably Callie would.”
“I’ll get her a kangaroo to go with it.” Banter. From banter to a quick scrutiny of his son’s face, Ansel Shurtliff said: “You look in great form, son. Happy.�
��
“I am happy, Pa. Things are going well.”
They walked briskly from the terminal to the parking lot. There, polished, shining in a last ray of late-afternoon sunlight was what Ansel Shurtliff called “my chariot” (i.e., his Jaguar). “Off we go.” And fast. Through traffic, Ansel Shurtliff maneuvered his chariot in a masterful way. They sped along, talking about family and friends and current affairs—Cuba, gone Communist under Fidel Castro; Alaska and Hawaii becoming the forty-ninth and fiftieth states—
“Here we are.”
Under the portico of the Grants’ house, the chariot rolled to a stop.
Tuesday, November 10, 1959
KISSEL, CHANDLER, SHURTLIFF & COLT
The brass name-plate never shone brighter to him than it did today.
He spent the morning with George Colt. Along with a crop of other firm matters, they discussed the legal complexities of the Forbes case.
“You have that hell-bent look you get on your face when you’re on a high, Morgan.”
“Oh?” (Thinking of Sylvia.)
“Well, it’s pretty damn exciting, your Forbes case—”
Morgan laughed. “Yes,” he said. “It’s damn exciting.”
He opened the restaurant’s door. “Miss Sly!”
This was the first time she had ever arrived at the restaurant in advance of him. It wasn’t that he was late (it was only 12:15), but that she was even earlier—waiting for him, looking (he thought) burdened, standing there indoors in a coat too heavy for today’s weather, that large black purse dangling floorward from its gripped strap. “Mr. Shurtliff.” His hat removed, held in his right hand, encumbered, they embraced, rapidly and awkwardly. “Let me take your coat,” he said. “I’ll check it with mine.”
He had reserved their usual alcove table. They decided to have a drink. Sherry on ice; two. “I’m not very hungry,” she announced. “A plain omelet and salad will do for me.” He echoed: “And for me.” He said to the waiter: “Give us a few minutes to have our sherry, Vincent. I’ll signal you when we’re ready to eat.”
Matters of Chance Page 48
